Neither Sequoyah [public safety director] nor Hensley [climatologist] were willing to come right out and blame climate change as an underlying cause of the drought and contributor to the fires. But others weren’t so reluctant.

Translation: I crapped out getting the official people to blame this on Global Climate Change caused by fossil fuels used to power Trump’s jet…

“The seasons aren’t the same,” evacuee Allysa Joyner of Gatlinburg said. “That’s where drought comes in. That could be part of it.”

Climate change is hard to believe, she added, “until you see it.” Monday night, she did.

You get a regular person with absolutely no climatological experience to endorse the view you’ve been shopping around. Which by the way, is not the way any other scientific reporting is done.

Source: NASA

Hensley said he didn’t know much about climate change. “I grew up in Florida and Mississippi,” he said, “and they didn’t teach it in school there.” [Witchcraft either. – Dave]

But he’d like to see more instruction about drought and its causes as part of Appalachian education. With a better understanding, he said, maybe local communities could “actually fix the problems, so this doesn’t ever happen again.”

Yes, with a better understanding of the cause of droughts,maybe this won’t happen again. Which is as close as the Grist writer could come to actually getting somebody to say we should live simply, so that others may simply live.

The fire that affected Gatlinburg, Tennessee was arson, according to genuine experts with the police and fire services.